Anne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature 2026

The academy cited Anne Carson’s ‘bold and inventive oeuvre’ in its awarding of the prize. Photograph: Pontus Lundahl/TT/ReutersView image in fullscreenThe academy cited Anne Carson’s ‘bold and inventive oeuvre’ in its awarding of the prize. Photograph: Pontus Lundahl/TT/ReutersAnne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature 2026Most prestigious literature prize goes to Canadian known for genre-crossing works such as Autobiography of Red

‘Delights await!’: Margaret Atwood and other writers on Nobel winner Anne Carson

The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to the Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson, the Swedish Academy has announced.

The academy cited the author’s “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.

The Nobel prize, regarded as the most prestigious award in global literature, is awarded for a lifetime body of work. The winner receives 12m Swedish kronor (£900,000).

Ingrid Carlberg, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said she had told Carson of the award on the phone shortly before the news broke. “She had time to tell me that she is, for the moment, in Iceland, where she is listening to the wind,” Carlberg said. “She was taken by surprise but very happy. I could hear that in her voice.”

View image in fullscreenBooks by Anne Carson on display at a Waterstones bookshop in London. Photograph: Hannah McKay/ReutersBorn in Toronto in 1950, Carson is known for work that moves freely between poetry, prose and translation, drawing heavily on the literature and mythology of the ancient Greek world. She has been a professor of classics at various institutions including Princeton, New York University and McGill University in Montreal. She is the 19th woman to win, out of 123 literature laureates.

Carson’s first book, Eros the Bittersweet, was published in 1986 and combined literary criticism with an exploration of desire and the ancient Greek tradition.

Her best-known work is Autobiography of Red, a 1998 novel in verse inspired by the fragments of the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus. It reimagines the myth of Geryon, the red-winged monster killed by Herakles, as the story of a modern teenage boy navigating heartbreak and desire.

In 2001, she became the first woman to win the TS Eliot prize, for her collection The Beauty of the Husband. She has also been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.

The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, congratulated the poet on X after the announcement. “With wit, imagination, and a style entirely her own, Canadian poet Anne Carson has reimagined the classics. She has brought ancient stories to new audiences and transformed the way we think about literature,” he said, adding that it was a “proud moment for Canada”.

David Leonard, the executive director of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, said: “Anne is such a brilliant writer. Her work is broad, but also extremely smart.” Calling Carson’s work “intoxicating”, he said her four-decade career had resulted in a peerless collection of poems and essays. “They’re beautiful, they’re smart, they’re true and they are humane. It’s exactly what we need in our writing.”

Carson’s work has attracted praise from fellow writers including Susan Sontag, who once said: “She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote. If there’s a magazine that has something of hers in it, I buy it automatically.”

View image in fullscreenIngrid Carlberg announcing Anne Carson as the recipient of the 2026 Nobel prize in literature in Stockholm on Thursday. Photograph: Christine Olsson/EPAAnders Olsson, the chair of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee for Literature, praised Carson for work that had “broken away from lyrical poetry bound to the narrative self and inspired new forms of contemporary literature”. He said: “This method of writing leads to playful and ironic works that move not only between classical and modern poetry but also between different genres and artforms.”

Carson’s books have ranged widely in form. Men in the Off Hours combined verse essays, poems, epitaphs and prose about artists and historical figures, and won the inaugural Griffin poetry prize in 2001. Decreation, another eclectic work, brought together poetry, essays and an opera.

Nox, published in 2010, is particularly characteristic of Carson’s avant-garde approach to literature – the book takes the form of an accordion-fold box containing a reproduction of a notebook Carson made after the death of her brother. Her later works include Red Doc> and Float.

In a Guardian review of Red Doc>, Sarah Crown wrote: “To engage so fluidly, so originally and compellingly, with a story first told more than 3,000 years ago, is astonishing: her ambition is one thing; the fact that it is so completely achieved is, frankly, something else.”

Much of Carson’s work has emerged from her fascination with language itself. The Swedish Academy noted: “Almost all her literary production has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning,” adding that Carson had identified the etymology of words as “the starting point for all her work”.

Asked why she continually moved between forms, Carson said in an interview: “Boredom, I guess. There is a restlessness. There are a lot of forms to try.”

She has acknowledged the difficulties that come with her experimental style. “[My work] does fall apart a lot,” she said in a 2018 interview. “It gets just too weird for anyone to care about reading, or else it gets diluted into a sort of parody of itself.”

Ira Wells, the president of PEN Canada, said Carson’s win felt “particularly significant at a moment in which Canada and Europe are strengthening cultural ties amidst broader global disruption”. He added: “On an aesthetic level, Carson’s verse vibrates on profound human frequencies, at a moment in which more and more language is formulated by machines.”

Carson has generally kept her personal life out of interviews. However, in an August 2024 article for the London Review of Books, she disclosed that she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded on 118 previous occasions since 1901. Recent laureates include Annie Ernaux, Bob Dylan, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Louise Glück, Peter Handke and Olga Tokarczuk. Last year’s recipient was the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, known for his dystopic and avant-garde writing.

Carson, 76, will formally receive the medal and diploma in a ceremony in Stockholm in December.

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